Is there something very specific you want to achieve – to feel more confident, be more assertive, build better relationships, use your skills and time better, get more focus or realise your potential? Perhaps there’s a vague sense that your life isn’t all that you want it to be and ‘there must be something more the life than this?’

Browse below to find out more about the life coaching and future basing that I provide and how these can help you achieve your goals, and about me and my approach. A link to contact me is at the foot of this page.

Life coaching

Future basing

About me

Personal and life coaching

Quite simply, personal or life coaching aims to help you identify and achieve your personal goals and ambitions. It’s a future focused activity which helps you to be more of the person you want to be, living more of the life you want to live. It’s an investment in your future.

Your goals may be broad or very specific. You may want to make major changes in your personal or work life, or you may simply wish to be more effective in one particular area. Either way, coaching can be an effective way of supporting you in getting you from where you are now to where you want to be.

Your goals may be connected to your work and performance, your personal life and relationships, your sense of purpose, fulfilment or wellbeing. Coaching can help in all these areas.

For details of my fees please see the About me and how I work section at the foot of this page.

Common questions

What kinds of issues can coaching help with?

Coaching can be helpful in almost any area of life where you feel there’s a gap between where you are now and where you’d like to be. If that gap can be met by developing a new skill or a fresh way of thinking about things then coaching can help. Rather than provide an exhaustive list of the areas where coaching can be applied, here are some common issues that coaching clients often come with:

How can I manage my time better to achieve more of what I want from life?

I want to learn to be more assertive and less worried about conflict.

How can I learn to be less overwhelmed by the stresses of my job and life?

I want to work out how I can achieve a better work/life balance

How can I manage to get my own needs met in relationships?

What can I do to build a life and career that’s more fulfilling?

How can I improve my relationship with my partner?

While this type of coaching is called life or personal coaching it can equally well help with concerns that are work related. What matters most is that we develop a shared understanding of where you want to get to and the best way there, and that I am able to provide a supportive and motivating environment within which you can achieve what you want.

How effective is coaching?

Coaching is most effective when we’re both very clear about your goals, what benefits achieving those goals will bring you, and how we can work together to help you achieve them. I’ll always be working towards us both sharing that level of clarity, and if we can reach that then coaching can be highly effective in reaching specific goals.

As well as specific goals, it’s clear that coaching clients also experience a range of wider benefitsWhat’s evident, however, is the degree to which its benefits are also experienced in a wider sense. A study conducted for the International Coaching Federation of 2,165 coaching clients found a wide range of client reported benefits that included improvements in:

Self esteem/self confidence (80%)

Relationships (73%)

Communication skills (72%)

Interpersonal skills (71%)

Work performance (70%)

Work life balance (67%)

Wellness (63%)

(% is the proportion of clients who report that benefit)

A range of additional, but less commonly reported, benefits were also recorded in both work related and personal issues. 96% reported that they would seek coaching again if the need arose and 83% were very satisfied with their experience of coaching.

What's your coaching approach?

Coaching begins with a conversation between us about what has brought you to coaching, what you’re looking for, and how we might work together.

I see coaching as a process we both contribute to, although we bring different things to it. My role is to provide a framework where you can develop clarity about your goals and what you need to achieve them, and support you in the process of developing the necessary strengths and skills. Your role is to take those developing strengths and skills into your wider world and begin to apply them. That may feel like hard work at times and a little scary, but if it were easy you’d have done it already. I will provide an environment for you that is supportive and motivating, and within which it’s acknowledged that it may not always go exactly as planned.

I’m not sure whether I need counselling or coaching

Making a simple distinction between counselling and coaching can be unhelpful. I see each as sitting on a continuum with counselling and coaching as the anchor points at each end. What happens in any work we might do together depends on what you’re hoping to get out of the process and your own resources.

Counselling tends to be more focused on getting a better sense of psychological balance or freedom from distress, and that’s likely to involve clearly identifying what is at the heart of the difficulty. Coaching tends to be more developmental in nature, building on existing strengths, and driven by a desire to further your potential. That said, in practice counselling may have a developmental component which can be appropriate. Similarly, coaching can have a therapeutic component and can be all the more more powerful for doing so.

So don’t worry if you don’t feel completely sure of what you need. I’m here to help you tease those issue out so that you can have a clearer sense of what our work together might involve.

What happens when I contact you?

You can contact me by phone, be email, or through the form on the Contact page. I’ll suggest that we have an initial discussion to talk about what’s brought you in touch and what you’re looking for. This is a chance for me to learn about your concerns and how I might be able to help, and for you to find out about me and decide whether you would feel comfortable working with me. There’s no charge for this.

There’s no obligation or pressure and you don’t have to decide at this stage – it’s better to take time and make the right choice. If we agree to work together then we can arrange further sessions. We’ll start with working together to define your goals. We plan and agree what you need to do to achieve them. We review progress and how well the process is working for you, and are flexible when we need to be. All this takes place within a number of sessions that are appropriate for your goals, and that we agree at the outset. When our work is complete we finish – and celebrate your achievements.

Life coaching

Future basing

About me

Future basing for individuals, couples and organisations

Achievements great or small, from putting a person on the moon, to living the life you actually want, start with a vision.

Future Basing is a powerful and creative way of building a compelling vision of the future and starting the journey towards it. It can be applied equally well in planning your own personal future, to shaping the future of organisations both large and small.

Future Basing turns traditional approaches to planning through 180 degrees. It assumes that we already have a picture, however incomplete this may be, of the future that we want to create. The Future Basing approach begins with developing this picture into a comprehensive and compelling vision. Rather than starting from now and attempting to look into the future, it instead steps into that future and assumes that it has already been created, then works back to find out precisely how.

For details of my fees, please see the About me and how I work section at the foot of this page.

Common questions

How is Future Basing different from other types of life planning and goal setting?

Most approaches to life planning and goal setting start from where we are now, and help us to look into the future and see how we want it to be different. From there we work on how to get there. Using this approach the journey is more likely to look like a very long flight of stairs we’re going to have to climb to get to the top. There are a lot of obstacles in the way.

Future Basing starts from the top of the stairs. It assumes that our desired future has already come about, and invites us to spend some time in exploring and describing it in detail, as well as how it feels to have arrived there. On the basis that it has already happened, we then map out in detail the steps that took us there.

In contrast to more traditional ways of life planning and goal setting, it’s not hard to see how creative, freeing and energising the process can be! Having used it myself, and with many of my clients, I can vouch for how powerful it can be.

It sounds a bit like wishful thinking - what's the evidence it works?

Future-Basing engages our creative imagination, and helps to connect our vision with the most fundamental things that motivate us – our values, desires, and sense of purpose. There is clear evidence of a link between these types of goals, the effort that we put into their achievement, and our likelihood of attaining them. There is also evidence that the achievement of goals which are based on these core values enhances our personal wellbeing – achieving them makes us happier.

This is part of what makes Future Basing so powerful.

Feedback from previous clients

….. I was suddenly able to see very clearly where I wanted to be in a specific future, set the evident goals and detect the blocks in the present. By identifying distinct milestones for that future to happen, it became obvious how feasible that reality was

Today, a few months later, I am still amazed how much my life has changed for the better. My future is now and (mostly) everything is on track. In just a few sessions, I have acquired a powerful tool for life

……I found it really useful, effective and immediately engaging. It helped to solidify a vision

…..It’s overwhelming value is envisioning a different and better future

What does the process involve?

The Future Basing process involves four key stages.

In stage 1 we identify a date for your future base. This is the point in the future where the future that you want has come to pass and is a reality.

Stage 2 involves exploring and describing in detail the world of your future base and the elements that comprise it. We do this in the present tense, as if it has already happened. The elements of your future base are yours to decide, but for most people they tend to be wide ranging and include work, work-life balance, income and finance, family and relationships, leisure and creativity, and so on. It’s for you to decide what that world now looks like. This exploration includes not just what it looks like, but what it means to you and how it feels to have achieved it, both critically important in providing future motivation.

At stage 3 we identify the precise steps that you took in creating this future. From this process will emerge a very detailed map of the actions and milestones that connect it to that point in the past when you created your future base.

Stage 4 involves a review of your future base and timeline, committing to the journey and identifying what you are already doing and the immediate next steps on that journey.

For individuals the process usually takes somewhere between four to five hours, for couples and organisations, a little longer may be required.

Why have I never heard of Future Basing before?

That’s a good question. While just about everyone has heard of coaching, strategic planning and goal setting, Future Basing often feels like a well kept secret. Maybe this is partly because the title doesn’t offer to many clues as to what it actually is. Try searching for ‘planning my life’ or ‘goal setting’ or ‘strategic planning’ on the internet and you won’t find Future Basing on the first search page. That’s a shame.

Future Basing was originally developed by Bill Phillips (with whom I trained in 2012). Bill is a is a certified International NLP Coach, an accomplished and experienced Team Coach and International Facilitator, and a Management Consultant. It can be used as a goal setting and life planning process with individuals and couples, as well as a means of vision building and strategic planning by organisations. You can also find out more details, including a range of organisational case studies, on the Future Basing website.

Life coaching

Future basing

About me

About me and how I work

I’ve been a counsellor and coach for more than 25 years, as well as a therapy service manager, and a trainer and consultant in therapy outcome evaluation. I’m also a workplace mediator. I am an Accredited Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and am part of the BACP Register of Counsellors and Psychotherapists. The register is accredited by the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care, an independent body accountable to Government.

I’m as passionate now, about the power of therapy and coaching to transform lives, as I was when I started. I’m also fully committed to my own personal and professional development, as I will be to your development, if you choose to work with me.